Hate is a simple answer to complex people and things in general. In ignorance (the lack of understanding, lack of knowledge or experience), I hated my mother from early childhood. She was the source and the cause of all things evil in my life. She was Ma, after all, and Ma is another word for comforter, healer, and unconditional love and all that. She wasn’t just any woman, she was Ma. She should live up to her title. She never did.

By the age of 37 I had had enough of Ma. I had enough of not being good enough, smart enough, skinny enough, successful enough, not to mention the tapes in my head that played in my head whenever she appeared like women are bad, sluts, and pretty much always to blame for everything.

In the early 90’s I was lucky enough to get a 5-6 week visit from her every spring. I would put on my fake smile of pleasure and leap tall buildings to please her but within days I was half out of my mind with grief and hate for her punishing voice in my ear every day.

I prayed. I believed in God then, enough to pray for him to take her away before she could do me any more harm. She was old. She’d lived long enough, caused untold anguish, I deemed it time for her to go. It never occurred to me that I could kill her, never once, but if God took her, well, that would be okay.

But God apparently was not listening, did not care, or just was not there. Just like when I was a child and really did believe all the hype about him, I was alone.

What changed was the ever growing piles of shame I heaped upon my head, another dark secret to carry to my grave.

Then in 1995 I purposely invited my mother to stay a few weeks in the spring. I had this absurd but noble idea that if I searched I could find some long buried bond between us. I wrote some about it in my first book. I have pages and pages of journals I wrote trying to keep my sanity. But again, within a week I was starting to imagine I would find her dead when I reached home from work instead of seeing her little innocent smile peering out the living-room curtain.

It was during that visit Ma told me she had known I was telling the truth when I was sixteen about Dad. ‘Then why didn’t you help me?” I was incredulous.

“I just couldn’t” was her only answer as she went on to describe her remembrance of Dad’s pacing and pacing all night long and not then knowing why.

I went to pieces. She and Dad and Sheila treated me so despicably at the time, silencing me to my silent anguished future, and all the time she knew I was telling the truth. That day was the only time I felt myself “split into two people, the adult and the child, the child chastising herself and the adult comforting the child. A policeman took me to the hospital. Mother left. My mind left for many months, a few years in fact, until after her death in March of 2000. It is all in my journals from that time period.

I no longer feel guilt for hating my mother. On her death bed she made one fleeting and feeble attempt at apology. I got this second hand, as I was not present. “If I have hurt any of my children, I am sorry.” It was her pride I suppose that kept her from ever admitting she did anything wrong. But most of twenty children hated her to a degree, some to this day.

I said that ignorance was the cause of my hate. Ignorance is the underlying cause of most hate. My hate kept me from trying to understand my mother. My inexperience and inability to understand myself caused me to seek out the simple solution, though hate is far more complex as was Mother.

I do not miss Ma. I doubt I ever will, except for the odd moments when I wish I knew more about her malady. So much I do not understand. But I am getting to understand myself. Every answer I find for my own behaviors brings me closer to my mother whom, sadly, I became very much like.